The World Wide Web (also referred to here as the “web”) provides a large collection of interlinked information sources (in various formats including texts, images, and media content) relating to virtually every subject imaginable. As the web has grown, the ability of users to search this collection and identify content relevant to a particular subject has become increasingly important, and a number of search service providers now exist to meet this need.
Conventional search services rely on indexing the content of various web pages. A user submits a search query comprising one or more search terms; the search terms are matched against terms in an index of web content; and a list of results is generated based at least in part on how well the content of particular pages matches the search terms. Simply matching terms, however, turns out not to be a reliable way of providing content relevant to the actual interest of a user.
More recently, efforts have been made to improve upon the conventional search though a search system that allows for users who visit a particular web page or site to evaluate it and make their evaluations public. User evaluations can be used to assist subsequent searchers. For instance, users may be able to “tag” the content item with keywords or labels that describe the subject matter of the item; the tags assigned by various users can influence the system's response to subsequent queries by that user or other users.
As users participate over time, however, search results may be inundated with user evaluations that are arbitrary or unrelated, resulting in often unreliable and ineffective supplemented search results. Therefore, there exists a need for systems and methods for generating search results comprising web documents with reliable user evaluation information.